


the most life-affirming parts

by kickedshins



Category: Archive 81 (Podcast)
Genre: Banter, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, chris hates pirates and that is her only flaw, interdimensional phonecalls, morgan is there and she's friends w nick and static man, musings about body parts and Payphone, static man gets a body, the general fuckery that comes with the City
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:00:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23687314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kickedshins/pseuds/kickedshins
Summary: He doesn’t ever fret about Chris. Or, no, that’s a lie, because he’s her brother, and he loves her, and he’s fucking terrified every single day, because he knows he can’t help her. He can’t fix anything for her, and he can’t save her, and he can’t be there to try and protect her.But he knows that he shouldn’t fret. She’s got her crew, her captain. Most importantly, she’s got herself, and she’s pretty damn formidable, as forces of nature go. So he tries to roll back his shoulders and loosen the knot in his chest and let things exist that are outside of his control.orAbout a year after returning from, Nicholas gives his sister a call.
Relationships: Christine Anderson & Nicholas Waters, background static man/nicholas waters
Comments: 13
Kudos: 81





	the most life-affirming parts

**Author's Note:**

> okay i just caught up on a81 and holy fuck do i have Thoughts on it. so so so many thoughts it's so good. here's some anderson-waters siblings friendship fluff with a sprinkling of background nick/static man and also morgan is there and her friendship w nick and static man is very sweet. very sad there's so few fics for a81 on ao3 so i thought i should contribute to the pool. enjoy!

It’s exactly a year and two weeks after leaving from the Blacktop that Nicholas manages to make a phone.

A lot has happened in a year and two weeks. Morgan made Static Man a body, for one thing, and it’s nothing that could accurately be classified as  _ human _ , but it’s a lot more human than it is anything else Nicholas has seen. It eats like a human and drinks like a human and sleeps like a human, not simply because it wants to, but because it needs to in order to survive. And it’s got hair and lips and hands, and… and everything else a human body is supposed to have. On the outside, at least. Nicholas hasn’t cut into the body, nor is he planning to, so he’ll have live with not knowing what it is that’s inside Static Man that causes his eyes to literally glow, or for electricity to pour out from his hair occasionally, or his teeth to shift into something a little sharper and of more substance than enamel at the most inopportune of times. 

In short, there’s a whole host of mysteries living inside Static Man and his home-grown body, and Nicholas might go crazy from lack of not knowing all of them, but that’s a risk he’s willing to take. He’s willing to do a lot for him, actually, which is a more-than-mildly terrifying concept with which to contend at the best of times, but he tries not to think about that too often.

And they found Morgan a job, and she’s saving up to get her own place, because as great as it is to have her around, Nicholas is pretty sure she doesn’t ever need to walk in on Static Man with his hand down Nicholas’s pants. Or amorphous non-Euclidean static-ness down Nicholas’s pants, because it took a while for Morgan to grow a body and it took a lot less time for Static Man to get Nicholas to admit that he regretted not just caving and sharing a bed while they were sleeping in motels and car-repair shops out on the Blacktop.

The complications of sleeping with (and then dating) a man-turned-static-being-turned-man aside, Nicholas has been occupied with rituals and magic and the secrets of the universe, or whatever, so he’s been busy. In a word, he’s been busy. Plus, he sometimes has to babysit to make a little money in a pinch, and when he’s trying to dissuade a toddler from breaking his cane over their chubby little knee, it’s a bit tricky to have the brain space to fret about Chris.

He doesn’t ever fret about Chris. Or, no, that’s a lie, because he’s her brother, and he loves her, and he’s fucking terrified every single day, because he knows he can’t help her. He can’t fix anything for her, and he can’t save her, and he can’t be there to try and protect her. 

But he knows that he shouldn’t fret. She’s got her crew, her captain. Most importantly, she’s got herself, and she’s pretty damn formidable, as forces of nature go. So he tries to roll back his shoulders and loosen the knot in his chest and let things exist that are outside of his control.

He spends a year and two weeks not giving up, though. Sure, it might not have always been at the forefront of his mind, because, yeah, he was occupied with Morgan re-entering the world and figuring out his own rituals and his will-they won’t-they with Static Man, but finding a pathway to consistent communication with Chris was a need that was forever floating in the background.

It’s not as if they went the whole time without speaking. Nicholas is very powerful, and worldstorms happen more frequently than he’d have guessed, so he’s been able to see her a few times, but brief moments of respite in the eye of a storm are nothing compared to docking in a safe harbor.

But a year and two weeks after Morgan stumbled, breathless, into the wall of a Brooklyn brownstone, and a year and two weeks after Static Man smashed the car radio to bits, and a year and two weeks after Nicholas offered the two of them a place to stay, Nicholas has finally perfected the phone.

It looks like a flip phone, but each of the keys plays a different note, and depending on how many times and for how long Nicholas presses them, the note comes out on a different octave. Without faltering for a second, he punches out the tune to Father’s lullaby. 

The phone rings once, twice. It rings out loudly in the rare silence of the apartment (Morgan’s at work and Static Man is finally comfortable enough in his body to go out job-searching), and for a moment, Nicholas is worried that it won’t work.

The line connects with a click. He sighs with relief.

“What do you want?” Chris demands.

“Christine! Chris, it’s me, it’s Nicholas,” he says.

She laughs. The sound is borderline hysterical. “You’re shitting me. You’re shitting me, right? Like, you’re joking?”

“I’m not joking. Virgin’s blood, remember?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I’m not about to forget that ritual. So—Christ, man, how long’s it been on your end? For me it’s been, uh, about six months since last time?”

“Three weeks,” Nicholas says.

“Fuckin’ time.”

“Fucking time,” Nicholas agrees. “How’s this working on your end? I’m curious; I don’t know.”

“A phone appeared in my pocket, and it was ringing, so I picked it up.”

“Oh!” Nicholas says. “Oh. Well, that’s a pleasant surprise. That’s simple.”

“Yeah. This shit isn’t gonna, like, take my blood as payment, or anything, will it? You know, your time is running out, please insert a dime and a quarter to continue your—”

“No,” Nicholas assures her. “It’s payment-free.”

“Good. Good, I’m so over payment for cell service. It’s something I haven’t had to worry about for almost five years at this point living out here, so... Jesus, remember Payphone?”

Nicholas laughs, a dry and aching thing, tough as the tendons of his leg on a particularly wintry day. “Every time I look at my left hand I remember.”

“It wanted your left hand? Cool. It wanted my eyes. Even gave me the rusty knife to cut ‘em out with and everything just because I wouldn’t say that… well. Yeah.”

“Eyes?” Nicholas hadn’t really considered that Payphone might want different things from different people. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, especially considering he’s seen the decor of the place where Payphone stored its heart, but it’s still a bit disorienting to realize that Chris gets something that he doesn’t.

To be fair, Chris gets a lot of things that he doesn’t. She’s been sailing the seas of the City for years now, and he’s been cooped up in his ward-protected apartment. Experience teaches things that books cannot, and adventure is its own kind of magic.

“Yeah, eyes,” Chris says. “Which, like, hell no. I need them to see, thank you very much.”

“Oh, really? I thought you needed them to hear.”

He can almost hear her roll her eyes. He can almost hear her smile. “Very funny, Nicky. You’re a real laugh riot.”

“Laugh riot? Christine.”

She makes a defensive noise. “Look, I picked up some speech patterns, or whatever, from the rest of the crew, and sometimes Lou talks like a suburban grandmother from New England, which makes absolutely no sense, but he’s just sort of weird like that. It’s whatever. It’s cool. I like it.”

“You…”

  
“What? Ew, no, Jesus, Nick. No, oh, Christ, no. Still very much a lesbian. Four years here and still firmly only swayed by those of the female or female-adjacent persuasion.”

That’s a relief, actually. Nicholas truly has no idea how much the City can change people. He knows people can change the City based on their will, as was shown by the Blacktop and Father’s never-dead desire to wreak his own selfish brand of havoc on anything that caught his eye, but he’s not sure what happens the other way around. He’s not sure if the will of City residents can alter other specific City residents either, and he wants to discuss this ad nauseum with Chris, but now that he’s got this phone, he has all the time in this world or the next to debate the finer points of willpower.

“Eyes,” he muses.

“Yeah. We’ve established that it wanted my eyes. Did you call me just to find that out?”

“No,” he says. “No, I called you because I love you, Chris.”

“Oh. Well, thank you, then, because I love you too. Idiot.”

He smiles, leaning against the kitchen counter. There’s an open cookbook splayed across the center. Static Man and Morgan have been trying to teach themselves to cook since even before Static Man got a body, and they’re both awful at it. It’s a very slow-going process. Nicholas isn’t a ton better himself, so they all eat a lot more Popeyes than they probably should.

“But it is interesting. How Payphone wanted your eyes and my hand. Left hand, to be specific. Non-dominant.”

“Oh great,” Chris groans. “Are you gonna go on another one of your weird pseudo-sexual rants about power? Because, seriously, I’m sure you can talk to Static Man about him letting you boss him around in the—”

“ _ No _ ,” Nicholas says, willing his flush to die down even though there’s no one around to see it. “Not everything is about  _ sex _ , Christine.”

“You only full name me when I’m being frustrating, and I know I’m a naturally charming person, so you’re usually only frustrated at me when I’m more correct than you are, so by that logic…”

“Why did I let you claim ‘the smart one’ as your title?” he sighs.

  
“Hey, you hopped on ‘the pretty one’ first, man. This is not on me. Although,” she admits, “you do have a point. It’s kinda weird what it wanted from each of us. Like, what’s so special about my eyes as opposed to the rest of me? And were you offended that it didn’t ask you to cut off your balls?”

“I’m just– Chris, I’m not even going to answer that second one, because what the fuck.”

“Awww, have you been picking up speech patterns too?”

He frowns, and then realizes that she can’t see his frown, so he lets out a little huff. “I swear.”

“I know you do, but you don’t say ‘because what the fuck’. That’s a total Static Man thing to say.”

“Moving on,” Nicholas says, because there’s very little he’d like to discuss with his sister less than the nature of his relationship with Static Man, “I think your eyes are special because you are an adventurer.”

She laughs, a sweeter sound than the brash sandpaper noises she used to force out on Earth. She postures a lot less now that she’s in the other world. “That’s cute, dude, but I hadn’t really gone on any trips at the time when Payphone asked for my eyes, unless you’re counting drug-induced ones, and I’m pretty sure you’re not.”

“Um, no, I am not, and I’d bet that Payphone wasn’t, either. I don’t think it’s about that, though, not necessarily. I think it’s more—” He cuts himself off, not wanting to bother Chris with rantings about magical theories. He should really let her talk about her latest adventures. He should really get some more friends.

Actually, he’s alright with the three he has, so that probably won’t happen.

“No, man, talk,” Chris says, easy and happy, the boulder on her shoulder filed down to just a chip. “Seriously. You have your nerd shit, and I have my adventures, and now that we have this phone, it’s not like we’re pressed for time. It’s multi-use, right?”

“Do you really think I’d design something that wasn’t?”

  
“Oh! This is a self-made ritual object? Right on,” Chris says, and though her voice is laced with trepidation, it’s also laced with pride, so Nicholas picks the latter to fuel him.

“Yeah. It was simpler than I thought it would be, actually. It did require a strange amount of musical know-how, though, so now I’m way more familiar than I’d like to be with contemporary Broadway shows. But—and this was a bit of a surprise, if I’m being candid—no animal sacrifice was involved.”

“Or human?” Chris jokes. “Jeez, remember the goat hearts? You were so fuckin’ freaked.”

Nicholas shudders. “A career in magic makes being a vegetarian extremely tempting, I’ll tell you that.”

“We’re digressing. How do we always manage to digress?”

“That’s the wonder of a professional pirate and a professional tamperer having a conversation, I suppose.”

Chris makes an indignant noise, and Nicholas snorts at it. “I’m not a pirate, dude. Pirates are the fuckin’ worst. Or, no, privateers are the worst, but pirates suck, too. Personally I think that anything that has repeatedly tried to kill me sucks.”

“Not all pirates can be that bad, can they?”

In his mind’s eye, Nicholas sees Chris crossing her arms across her chest and lifting her chin defiantly. He should make inter-dimensional FaceTime, he thinks. “In my experience, all pirates try to put a cannonball through the hull of the  _ Irons  _ or a bullet through my side, so, yeah, I’d say I’m justified in my hatred of them. And also, did you just describe yourself as a professional tamperer?”

Nicholas shrugs. “Technically I think I’m a professional babysitter, because that’s the only non-magic way I make mon—”

“Babysitting? Nick, babysitting?”

“Nicholas. And, yes, babysitting. When I need to. I had less and less time to be a TA, and it’s not like I can take a job that has defined hours, because how am I going to explain to Starbucks that I need to take three weeks off to go hunt down the glass eye of a man who will part with it for the price of a month of my life? And, no, that wasn’t an actual ritual component, don’t worry, I’m not going around selling bits of my life. Plus, you’d be… you’d be surprised at how little my degree actually does for me.”

“Ha! Now you know how I felt about not finishing college.”

Nicholas sighs. “Yeah, I guess I do. So… sorry about that, then.”

“Hm?”

He pushes off of the counter and starts to pace around the kitchen in slow, mildly labored steps. His leg’s been acting up lately, because about a week ago he twisted his ankle while walking through Central Park to collect some water from the Reservoir, and now he has even less of a desire to ever go to Manhattan again. Unsurprisingly, though, the downtown witchcraft and esoterics shops have a lot of basic ingredients he can use, and even some rarer ones, on occasion, so he’s there with relative frequency.

“About ever making you feel bad. About that. About college.”

“Oh. Oh, that? No, don’t sweat it, man. Really.”

But Nicholas knows Christine, knows her better than he knows anyone else, and knows that this means something to her. He really wasn’t the best about it, hiding up in his ivory tower of books and ten-point Scrabble words while being completely dismissive of her own life experiences. And now he’s followed her down the path of adventure and whimsey, and though the road is a forked one, it’s the same road nonetheless. He supposes it’s due in part to her, to her unflappable confidence and her surety that adventure and exploration is a better thing than sitting comfortably with what’s known. So he’s thankful. And so he’s sorry.

“So,” Chris prompts him, clearly eager to get away from this topic of conversation, “hands? And eyes?”

“One hand,” Nicholas corrects. “My left hand.”

“Right. Or, well, left, but, y’know. Right. You said it was your non-dominant hand, and then I said that if you want to top, you just have to have a conversation with Static Man about it, and then you said—”

“And then I said  _ shut the fuck up, Chris, or I’ll find a way to traverse worlds and strangle you _ .”

“Awww. All that for little old me?”

“Yeah, you are little, aren’t you?”

Chris scoffs. “Okay, look, no, five-seven is above average for a woman. Just because you’re a fucking beanpole doesn’t mean that—”

  
“So I think it wanted your eyes,” Nicholas says, not prepared for his sister to call him a twink before noon on a Tuesday, “because of, well, how you see the world.”

There’s the sound of flapping fabric in the distance, sails on the wind, and Nicholas can almost see it: Chris standing in the crow’s nest of the  _ Irons _ , sunlight glinting off the gold in her ears and her eyebrow, the crew below her and the sea surrounding her. “What’dya mean?”

“You want to see the adventure in things. You want to see the most life-affirming parts. You’re reckless—”

“Hey!”

“It’s true.”

“It is.”

“You’re reckless, but it’s not as if you have rose-colored glasses on, because that would imply that you’re stupid and disillusioned, which you’re not.”  
Chris makes a sound like air hissing out of a slit balloon. “Gee, thanks. Also, I don’t think that’s what rose-colored glasses imply.”

“To me it is. That’s not important, though, because, like I said, that’s not you. Payphone probably wanted your eyes for that. Magic’s a lot more than the literal components, and eyes are worldview and the window to your soul, and I’d guess that your soul is pretty worth coveting.”

Nicholas can hear the smile in Chris’s voice when she says, “Aw, shucks, man. So you think it wanted my eyes because my hottest trait is my dashing sense of adventure and my soul of snow-white purity?”

Nicholas presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose, pushing his glasses up. “Jesus. I absolutely refuse to answer that, because, one, I’m not going to say you have a hottest  _ anything _ . That’s disgusting. And snow-white purity is a bit of a stretch.”

“Eh, only as much as a light side bend is a stretch.”

“More like a full split done by an out-of-shape man with a leg injury.”

“Oh, shit, sounds like you and Static Man are—”

  
“Fucking hell, Christine.”

She cackles, free and gleeful. “And why would Payphone want your left hand, then?”

“You tell me. It’s your turn for psychoanalysis.”

“Ew, is this an experiment on the closeness of half-siblings, or whatever?”

Nicholas sighs. “I’m a history nerd, not a science nerd, remember? I know we all sort of look the same to you, but I promise, I’m as bad as basic algebra as you are.”

“Hm,” Chris says. “Well, okay, hands. Hands. I guess… look, if we’re looking at the more metaphorical side of all this, it could be about the rituals, right? Or, well, not about the rituals, exactly, but you’re a creator and a destroyer. You’re pretty damn powerful. And it’s not like you don’t use other things for that, obviously, like your mind would probably be the most covetable thing about you, but if you tried to cut out your brain you’d die before you finished, so that’s not gonna be an option. Your hand is like… I mean, you use it to turn pages and write rituals and perform them all, and maybe it wanted your non-dominant one because it wanted you to keep on doing that. Keep the magic alive, or whatever. Which, like, yeah, you could do with just your left hand, but it’d be harder than with just your right. So.” She trails off, coughing awkwardly away from wherever the phone picks up audio.

Nicholas feels a warmth build in his chest. It never stops being delightful to hear someone affirm his power, but more than that, it never stops being delightful to hear someone affirm his dedication and his mind and his genuine talent.

“Yeah,” Nicholas agrees. He wants to say more than that, wants to thank Chris for picking up the phone, for keeping at least one foot grazing the soil of this world. But he doesn’t know how to express his love beyond saying, “So, you’ll call again, right?”

She barks out an incredulous laugh. “You’re kidding, right? I actually kinda have to go now, because Sonder just gestured to me that we’re a few minutes away from land, but dude, of course I’ll call again. I’ll call you like once a week, I promise. Though, I mean, for you that could be years, so…”

“But I’ll call, too. Between the two of us, we can speak often.”

“Fantastic. Great. Okay. Uh, how do I call you, though?”

“Father’s lullaby.” Through the phone, Chris makes a noise akin to  _ what did I expect. _ “You may have to spend a while figuring out which key sounds what note,” Nicholas continues, “because it’d be presumptuous of me to assume that your copy of the phone will work exactly the same as mine—”

“Oh, of course, we wouldn’t want to be presumptuous, now, would we?”

“—but with a bit of toying around, I know you’ll figure it out.”

Wood creaks and waves crash. Chis is clearly climbing down the mast of the ship, because her voice comes out way too close to Nicholas’s ear, the phone jammed between her shoulder and her jaw. “Awesome. Wanna figure out a way to send interdimensional text messages?”

“Chris. I spent a year and two weeks on this.”

“Great, so that’s a yes, then? C’mon, man, I can’t go the rest of my life without seeing a single other meme ever. Can you imagine that? Actually, no, don’t answer that, because I think the answer would just bum me out.”

Nicholas smiles dryly. “You’re forgetting who my boyfriend is.”

There’s a clatter of metal and plastic against wood, then the rustle of cloth, and Christine’s voice swearing up a storm. “Shit, shit, shit,” she says, her voice getting closer with each iteration. “Shit, sorry, got a little excited and dropped my phone. It’s still fine on your end, right?”

“Yeah,” he says, hopeful that she can hear his grin, “it’s still fine on my end. What was that all about?”

“Your  _ boyfriend _ . Boyfriend! Shit, Nicholas, you know how long I’ve been waiting for you to actually call Static Man your boyfriend?”

“It happened a few months ago,” he admits.

“And you said the last time we talked was… three weeks ago for you? Nick...”

“I just– Look, it could have gone poorly, and I know you guys are friends, and, I mean, yes, it’s not as if you were going to be able to talk to him before I had finished making this phone, but I was just—”

“Insecure,” Chris says, voice soft. “Worried it would fall through. It’s okay, Nicholas. Even the most powerful of—what did you call yourself?—tamperers can be insecure.”

Nicholas doesn’t respond to that, which is as good an answer as anything.

Chris quickly picks the tone back up. “But, like, you guys fucked before that, right?”

“Oh, my– You know what? You know what? Yes, Christine, we did. We fucked before he even had a body, so do with that information as you will.”

“Nice,” Chris says. “If I was there with you I’d give you a fistbump.”

“You’re a flippant tart.”

“Tart? Christ, Nicholas, that seventeenth-century obsession is getting to you, you absolute weirdo.”

“Love you too,” Nicholas says, and ends the call.

**Author's Note:**

> thx for reading! kudos/comments are always appreciated, or go find my rants abt podcasts @ commaperson on twitter :D


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